Beekeeping
by chai4anne
Summary: Sherlock's thoughts on beekeeping.


Note: Future fic with - be warned - character death. Friendship; no slash.

My apologies to any readers who are hoping for a case-fic: there's no mystery in this one. It's just some thoughts on what might happen to Sherlock and John in the future, though I'm sure it's nothing we'll ever see on the screen. I suppose some readers might find it a bit grim. Oddly enough, I don't. What I find depressing are some of the things we've seen on the show that (to my mind, anyway) have yet to be resolved. This story is about one way that might happen.

My thanks again to Fang's Fawn for her encouragement, and for all the enlightening conversation about the show.

Beekeeping

Sherlock never expected to become an old man. He'd always assumed he'd die young - shot or possibly poisoned in pursuit of some gang of criminals, overdosed (accidentally or otherwise) when he'd vanquished all the masterminds and solved all the cold cases in the Met's back files, and life became too boring to be worth bothering with anymore. It wasn't that he wanted an early death, particularly, but there was no denying that that was the most probable outcome of any life lived as close to the edge as he liked his to be. He didn't mind; a shorter amount of time was well worth the trade-off in interest and excitement, though as long as Lestrade kept bringing him cases, and the Moriarties and Magnussens of the world kept stirring things up and making them interesting, he certainly intended to stay alive to enjoy the game as long as he could.

He just hadn't thought he'd be doing it for so long - or, after John Watson limped into his life that fateful afternoon at St. Bart's, that he'd have to do it alone. A. J. (After John), if he did picture making it to old age once in a while, he always assumed they'd spend it together - perhaps not _running _around London forever (even he could concede that that might not be entirely reasonable for a pair of eighty-somethings), but still getting around it in taxis, solving crimes right up to the end. And the end would, of course, come first for Sherlock. He simply couldn't envision life unfolding any other way.

He himself might _choose _to go off somewhere without John - might even fake his own death and leave everyone he knew behind for years - but he'd always known he'd come back and resume life in Baker Street again in the end, whenever that might be. John getting married and leaving Baker Street had been a shock at first, but Mary had been so exceptionally understanding and willing to share that things had worked out much better than Sherlock had expected - that bullet she put in Sherlock's chest, and John's sense of betrayal when he learned about her lies, notwithstanding. And then Mary's past had caught up with her, and she and the baby had died, and John had ended up back in Baker Street after all. It had taken time, but after a while, when John had done the obvious part of his grieving, and Sherlock had surprised himself by doing some grieving right along with him, everything had pretty much gone back to the way it was before: Sherlock battling masterminds and solving crimes, and John striding along behind him, acting as his sounding-board and conductor of light.

Sherlock expected them to go on like that forever - or at least, until that long-foreseen final bullet or dose of poison brought his side of things to a graceful and not un-welcome end. He assumed, whenever he thought about it at all, that when it happened, John would mourn him for a time and then get on with his life as he'd done before, after Sherlock took that walk off the roof of St. Bart's. He'd probably marry again. Without a consulting detective around to tempt him out on the streets with the lure of mystery and danger, it was inevitable, really; left to his own devices, John was that sort of man. He'd marry, settle into a house in the suburbs, and raise his 2.5 children on the comfortable salary of a full-time NHS doctor and stories of his glory days as the great detective's assistant and friend.

But that isn't the way it goes. It's John who takes the bullet, pushing Sherlock down and out of its way, and so it's John who dies young. Well, Sherlock thinks of it as young, anyway; much too young, and all backwards, not the way things were supposed to happen at all, all of it just totally, completely, and unthinkably _wrong. _

But it does happen, in broad daylight, in the front room of a little pastry shop, of all places - which means that Sherlock never is able to catch a whiff of warm bread baking again without finding himself kneeling among a chaotic scattering of battered cane chair-legs on a scuffed and grubby, blue-and-white tiled floor; suffocating in the burning, cloying stench of gunpowder, hot metal, coffee, yeast, chocolate, pastry cream, and blood; his hands frantically pressing down on John's chest while the warm, stinking red stuff - so much, much, much, too much of it - wells up through his fingers and John coughs and bleeds his life out beneath them.

And so it's the consulting detective who has to do the mourning, and the getting-on with his life alone again. For a while there, that not-so-accidental overdose is a distinct possibility, a very attractive temptation indeed.

Not at first - the shock carries him through at first. Later, though, when Lestrade starts bringing him cases again, and he finds himself coming back to Baker Street alone at the end of a week of long, long days away; avoiding Mrs. Hudson, because he can't bear her sympathy, or her tears, or the smell of her baking; eating (when he absolutely can't avoid it any longer) his take-out alone; sitting in his chair opposite John's empty one, alone; talking to himself, and _knowing _he's talking to himself and not John, alone; finding himself suddenly back on that tiled floor, John with his shirt soaked in blood, blood running out of his mouth, pink bubbles frothing up as he coughs and struggles for air, and still somehow finding the strength and focus and - Sherlock can't even think of a word for it - the _whatever_ that makes him John, to gasp, painfully and almost inaudibly, "You all right?" and then, when Sherlock nods and says yes, because he knows John needs him to, still somehow managing to murmur, through the coughing and the blood, "'Ss all right, then. Don' worry. 'Ss all right" - it's _then _that Sherlock's old street haunts begin to look truly interesting again, along with the sweet escape he knows he could find in them.

It's only his distaste for emotional display that restrains him; he finds, unexpectedly, that he does in fact care enough about what other people think that the idea of Donovan or Anderson, or Lestrade or Molly Hooper or Mrs. Hudson, or - God forbid - _Mycroft _realizing just how dependent he's come to be on John's company, and just how empty, painful, and pointless life after John seems, is repellant to him.

_"Look at them," _he remembers saying to Mycroft once._ "They all care so much. Do you think there's something wrong with us?" _And his brother, answering, "_All lives end; all hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock."_

He'd cared then, more than he'd wanted to let on. He cares now, much, much more than that. But he's defined himself for so long by aloofness and apparent lack of feeling, along with his brilliant observations and deductions, that he can't stand to expose himself so completely now. So he waits, and wonders how much longer he's going to have to keep up this charade of pretending that everything is really quite all right; when he can reasonably go ahead and indulge in that overdose without anyone's making the connection. Another stray bullet might be more convincing, of course - but none of the criminals he goes chasing after oblige.

And then Mycroft - in what has to be, Sherlock thinks bitterly, his most Mephistophelean set of maneuvers in the whole course of their twisted, tormented, and tormenting relationship - has to go and point out that 1) John died to save Sherlock's life, and even a mannerless permanent-adolescent like Sherlock must realize how ungrateful it would be to throw away a gift that cost so much, and 2) John's continued existence in the world now depends entirely on his place in Sherlock's mind-palace, and that if Sherlock values his memories of his friend at all, he might want to do his best to preserve the mind that holds them.

It's a ridiculous argument. But somehow Sherlock can't get it out of his head. John _is _there in the mind-palace, of course; he knows that. He just hasn't been able to bear to call him up. Letting himself spend time with that John feels like too much of a compromise, when what he wants is the real thing. And Sherlock has never had any use for compromise at all.

But still, what if Mycroft is right? He usually is - that's the worst thing about him. The thought nags. It comes between the shell-shocked detective and the alluring white powder, between him and the beckoning needle, every time he feels drawn toward the streets. _What if I live, _he thinks, _and lose the memories? What will I do then?_

And so, Sherlock lives. He grows older. He tries to keep up The Work for a while, but the cases no longer interest him much, and eventually he decides to stop. He shocks everyone he knows, Mycroft most of all, by buying a cottage on the South Downs and moving there to take walks along the country lanes and clifftops, garden, and keep bees.

Everyone thinks he must be conducting some kind of important scientific research on the bees, probably something to do with a case, but the truth is that he just finds them quiet company that doesn't interrupt his thoughts. Any research he does in the Downs is more philosophical than scientific in nature, which would astound his old acquaintances if they knew about it. It would shock his brother into another dimension, he thinks - even though Mycroft has always said Sherlock has the mind of a philosopher, as well as a scientist or a detective.

He keeps on growing older. The dreams and flashbacks lessen to some extent, but they don't stop completely. And as he ages and watches the bees, he begins to think about many things quite differently than he did before. It isn't a comfortable process, and yet he finds it an oddly compelling one. It annoys him not to be able to say exactly when and how the change actually happens, but he can't. It creeps up on him gradually, this feeling that he doesn't really care much anymore for the man he'd been back then, when John had been with him; that he doesn't actually _like _the Sherlock he'd let - no, made - John know.

One of the moments of thought-shift that he _can_ pinpoint is the day when it dawns on him, after a hard night spent kneeling on a blue-and-white floor, that this must be what the two years after his faked suicide had been like for John.

That's a hard one to take in. He fights with it at first - no, it couldn't have been like that, he wasn't _really_ dead, he was always going to come back, and anyway, everyone liked John, he had lots of friends, losing Sherlock - or thinking he had - couldn't possibly have caused him the same kind of grief that his actual death is beating Sherlock up with now.

He knows that's a lot of crap. Yes, John had other friends, but John was also the one who _cared _about people in the way Sherlock had never allowed himself to before he met John. He'd had more experience of loss, of course - Sherlock tries to comfort himself with that thought at first. He lets himself get away with it for about half a day. Then the resumption of his own night terrors reminds him of all the times he's heard John waking in the night, gasping and crying out, and sometimes calling out the names of men Sherlock knew he must have seen die back in Afghanistan. His bedroom might have been upstairs, but sound carries remarkably well down the pipes of an old house. Watching his bees buzzing around their hive the morning after that bad night, Sherlock can't imagine why he hadn't _thought_, before he planned out Operation Lazarus with Mycroft and Molly Hooper, about the images he'd be adding to the shit-load of horror John already carried quietly inside his head every day.

He never is able to get the thought of that quite out of his own head again, and after that his own flashbacks are mingled with images of himself lying on the pavement at St. Bart's, eyes staring, blood on his face, and John crouched over him, John's hand trembling on his wrist, John's voice breaking. It's not that he hasn't thought about those things before, but the reality of what they must have done to John hits him with agonizing new force, now that he knows what it feels like to watch your best friend die.

He can't forgive himself for that. He hadn't had to do it that way. He could have taken John with him. He could have set things up so John didn't have to see it. He could have warned him what was going to happen. He could, at the very least, have gotten in touch with him soon afterwards, and let him know it hadn't been real at all. It's not like he hadn't _known _that John already had bad things to dream about; he just hadn't thought about what that really felt like, or how much worse he was going to make things by adding his own bloody face to the mix.

No, he doesn't like the man who did that to John very much at all.

There are a lot of things he doesn't like about that man now. He talked too much, for one thing. Oh, he could go for days without saying anything to his flatmate at all, but then he'd open his mouth and a torrent of words would gush out that drove everyone around him mad. They'd been clever words, but he wishes he'd listened more - especially to John. There are so many things he could have asked John about himself, and didn't; now he'll never know what John would have said. He'd been so confident in his ability to read people, but his deductions weren't always complete, or even right; he'd gotten Harry's sex wrong, the first time he'd even tried to read John. Why hadn't that tipped him off? Why hadn't he realized how much he was assuming or taking for granted, how very little he was bothering to inquire about? John wasn't the kind of man who wanted to talk about himself, of course; that was probably one of the only reasons he'd been able to tolerate Sherlock's company at all. But Sherlock still wishes he'd asked.

He wishes, too, that he hadn't sometimes treated John so much like - not just like a pet dog, but - there's no way around it - like a guinea pig or a lab rat, for God's sake. He wishes he hadn't sat back with his feet up on a desk and watched John crawl through that lab at the Baskerville, sobbing with terror after getting dosed with that hallucinogenic drug. He thinks now that was possibly the coldest, ugliest thing he'd ever done - uglier, even, than jumping off that roof in front of John, because at least then he'd had some shred of thought that he was doing it _for _his friend, even if he hadn't bothered to think very carefully about what he was doing _to _him, and whether John would think the outcome was worth it anyway.

He hadn't been trying to do anything for John at Baskerville at all. He'd been furious that John had seen _him_ shaking with fear after his own bout with the drug, and this had seemed like a way to even the balance, while testing his theory at the same time. He'd been trying to take his anger out on John for having found out that his great detective friend was as human and vulnerable as anyone else - something he realizes now John must have known all along, anyway.

Remembering Baskerville and St. Bart's, the memory of John's last words cuts into him more painfully even than before. "It's all right. Don't worry. It's all right." It wasn't all right. How _could_ John have thought his dying was all right? Had he really not known how much he mattered? Maybe he hadn't. Maybe he, Sherlock, had never given John any real reason to know how much he would be missed, how badly. Or not enough reason, anyway. Oh, there'd been that wedding speech, of course - he'd been quite pleased with that once - but he can think of so many times now when he could have said something more, and didn't. . . .

Really, it astounds him how entirely fixated that younger Sherlock had been on himself. So eager to show off his own brilliance; so keen to suck up the praise that John had readily offered; so inclined to boost his own ego by putting others down. Even his one real friend. Even John. . . .

Yes, well, that came back to the talking again.

He wishes now that, for all the clever talking he'd done, he'd at least talked _differently_, said different things. Not been so ready to call other people idiots, especially John. That was the word he and his brother had used ever since he could remember, of course: their chief barricade against the cutting things the other children had called them, their way of reminding themselves of their own vast superiority and, for all the rivalry between them, their solidarity with each other. He wonders why their parents hadn't intervened.

But of course, his father had always cheerfully described himself as an idiot, and his mother - who ever knew what his mother was thinking of? Washing-up and casseroles and esoteric math. . . . Her mind had always been somewhere else, either fixated on the tedious details of domestic life, or off in some completely different dimension that she never attempted to share with her sons. He'd actually thought for a long time that she and his father really were quite ordinary, and he and Mycroft some kind of genetic sports made all the more unique by defying the odds and popping up in the same family together. The parents had done a good job of impersonating ordinariness, of course - happily fussing at him and Mycroft about eating and sleeping and putting on their wellies, and otherwise leaving them pretty much to their own devices, to bring themselves up by themselves.

Ordinary. He'd thought of John that way for a long time, too. He remembers with particular chill telling him once that he'd never been the most luminous of people, but he did a great job serving as a conductor of light. To Sherlock, of course. _John_. Not luminous. How he'd managed to be so blind, he has no idea.

He wishes he could tell John how much more he always was than that. So much more - even if he, Sherlock Holmes, the genius detective, had managed to miss it quite spectacularly. He wishes he could tell John that, when he thinks of him now - and he spends most of every day doing just that - it isn't as a sounding-board or a "conductor of light," who could somehow make Sherlock himself think more clearly. It isn't as an ordinary man who served Sherlock's genius at all.

What he sees now is a man who was modest, warm, self-deprecating, ironic, self-effacing, steady, brave, endlessly loyal, and - though this is the quality Sherlock has taken the longest to acknowledge and consciously appreciate - endlessly, deeply _kind. _He knows now that there's nothing ordinary about that at all. And he wonders how he ever came to be so self-absorbed that he had seen John's qualities so entirely in relation to himself, had valued them only - or at least, primarily - for what they did for _him. _

He'd been like the queen bee, he thinks, making everything in the hive revolve around him. But his months and years of beekeeping have taught him that the queen bee is only a part of the whole. She breeds in the darkness; she can't live separately from the rest of the hive, any more than any other bee can. And she isn't really any more important than the rest of the hive, either, however much it may seem as if she were what the whole thing is about. The hive is what the whole thing is about, and the hive is a whole; it can't exist without all of its parts living and breathing together. It can't exist without the fields and flowers around it, either-or the sun and rain that pour down from the sky and make them grow.

At first, Sherlock thinks John was like one of those worker bees, whose labours in bringing back the pollen to the hive he's come to find quite intriguing. But then, watching his bees one sunny afternoon after a bout of rain, he remembers again what he said to John that day at Baskerville, and realizes he's had it all wrong.

John wasn't a worker bee. He wasn't a conductor of light, either. He'd brought light to Sherlock, of course - there's no question about that - but not because Sherlock was the lightbulb, and John just the wires in the wall, or the flex along which the charge ran. John - modest, warm, self-deprecating, self-effacing, steady, brave, loyal, kind John - hadn't been the wires or flex at all, or even the electric charge. He was the light itself - a great, huge, shining light, like the sun.

He smiles a little as he thinks about how John would react if he could hear that. His face and ears would turn red and he'd laugh incredulously, and ask what Sherlock's trying to take the piss out of him for - and then, if Sherlock pressed the point, he'd probably start searching the flat for drugs. He would never, in a million years, believe that Sherlock could come up with a thought like that clean and stone-cold sober.

But, while the idea makes Sherlock smile, it doesn't make him want to laugh at all. He's completely taken by it. John _had _been a genius, he thinks; he'd had a brilliance of his own that had outshone Sherlock's the way the sun outshines the moon. It wasn't an intellectual brilliance - it was something very different to that - but that didn't make it any less important. He used to twit John about thinking too slowly, but John was in fact quick, even instantaneous, in shedding his own kind of light - and John's kind of light seems to Sherlock now a much wider, deeper, more significant thing than the intellectual speed he always took such delight in in himself.

His own intellect bores him now. It's John's light he spends his days thinking about, as he watches his bees buzzing in and out of their hives; John's way of being brilliant that occupies his mind.

John, he thinks, was able to see what Sherlock himself could not see or understand then - the importance of other people. He'd had a sharp wit and a keen sense of humour; he'd always been ready to laugh at the failings of others, as well as his own; but still, Sherlock thinks he'd probably never met anyone he hadn't been able to see some value in - even the people he'd killed, and passed off the killing lightly by saying they hadn't been very nice men.

Thanks to Mrs. Hudson's old house, Sherlock has always known that John did, in fact, regret the necessity for every one of those deaths, and had paid for them in long, hard nights afterwards. He's just never thought until recently about what, in the big picture of who John was and what Sherlock valued most in him, that meant.

He used to love the fact that John, the doctor, would abandon his practice and come with him, running through the streets and jumping over rooftops while packing a gun. Now he knows that the real John always was every bit as much the doctor, whose mundane work at the clinic Sherlock had openly disdained, as the soldier he'd companioned with. John had loved the adventure, but he'd also loved simply making the people he met feel better - physically, of course, but in so many other ways as well.

It's only now, all this time later, that Sherlock can see how much that side of his friend had meant, how important it really was. That John was like the sun, he thinks, shining down on the hive after a sharp storm of rain, warming the bees and drying out their wings, setting them free to go about their great, buzzing business of life again.

He's glad he can see that now. After all this time talking to John in his mind-palace, scrutinizing so carefully every fibre of his one true friend's being, he has come to look at the world not so much through his own eyes as through John's - and he's found it a better, warmer, more _interesting_ place than he'd ever realized was possible.

He wonders what John would have being doing in that world for all these years, if he hadn't decided so unaccountably that it was Sherlock who ought to live. He wonders what he would be doing _for_ it now.

And so, after a long time in the country keeping bees, his hair beginning to silver and his shoulders slightly stooped, Sherlock Holmes packs his bags and moves back to London, curious to see what new thing the John in his head would have him do there.

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Another note: I hadn't read geekery-pokery's "Please just stay" until after I'd finished this, and was taken aback when I did by some of the similarities in the way we'd both envisioned John's last moments. I wanted to change my scene to avoid the overlap with hers, but nothing I tried seemed to sound right. In the end, I decided maybe there was a reason for that, and went ahead and posted it unchanged. My apologies to geekery-pokery, and to anyone else I might have echoed unintentionally. I'm still very new to this fandom; there's a lot I haven't read yet.


End file.
